domain:vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com
Corvos
just now
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
Sunshine
2m ago
As a Canadian, I would be in favor of this on the condition that you get your own shit under control before you start messing with ours. When I make a list of possible solutions to Canada's political dysfunctions, "Invasion by US military under Donald Trump" does not rank highly.
Corvos
5m ago
My parents (admittedly over 60 now) can't reliably open a browser on a laptop. They certainly have no idea what a QR code is. The idea that parents will be able to find the parental controls, understand what they're doing, and set them independently is unlikely in many cases, so they have to trust their children. In ten years it may be quite different but right now I think that's still the reality and realistically Discord has to bear that in mind.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6m ago
There's a reductio ad in either direction right?
On the one hand, replacing every American with a higher-IQ Chinese or Indian person might raise the GDP by 15%, but it's weird to say it would be obviously incorrect to say it would be good for "America."
On the other, admitting Jensen Huang to the country obviously benefits America, even if it dilutes the pool of Americans. 1/333000000 dilution, versus a roughly $500 estimated increase in GDP per capita.
Corvos
11m ago
Has there been a non-Baltic Western state that dissolved in the last couple of centuries? I can't think of any offhand. Austria-Hungary was dissolved by force post WW1, as was Germany post WW2.
A good LLM swears up and down that "kang" meaning something like "presenting others' work as your own" existed in the Android ROM community, entirely unrelated to and predating "we wuz kangz", which seems very implausible.
AOKP (Android Open Kang Project) was a major project from 2011. This thread attests "kang" among Android ROM enthusiasts in 2010 and does not reflect knowledge of that type of humor. No etymology is solidly attributed anywhere (that XDA thread suggests MMO slang "gank", wiktionary claims (unsourced) an otherwise-lost username). 2010 feels too early to me for "we wuz kangs", but then I reflect on other things that were around at the time and am not so sure.
Can anyone speak on this?
odd_primes
53m ago
Both are insane. The former perverts the intent of the legislative branch of government, and the latter is some form of bizarro judicial equivalent of jury nullification.
chooky
54m ago
The numbers have always been somewhat imperfect but very much not politically gamed, imo. I mean, did Trump want the BLS for the past three months to have changed longstanding procedure in order to put out drastically worse jobs numbers reflecting the estimated impact of the DOGE cuts and other things? Many government agencies are much more wedded to procedure and neutrality rather than a private sector financial analyst who would prioritize being right, though it is worth noting that the Atlanta Fed moved reasonably quickly to correct for the impact of gold imports on GDPnow.
For the BLS, however, this is now somehat changed, and there will be less trust until a real person gets out in charge again and says the right things.
odd_primes
56m ago
If the individual is allowed to be out in public unfettered he will have some non-zero contact with children. For example if he gets sent to do community service picking up trash in a public park, there likely will be children playing in the park at some point. The bigger issue is making sure that someone like that is not in a position of trust or authority over minors that they could leverage inappropriately. If they can't be trusted in public spaces at all, they should be incarcerated. Obviously this guy should have been deported though.
chooky
1hr ago
Forget ethics. This seems like a huge financial loss. With AI, there is at least the argument that the AI will be able to scale infinitely once trained. This does not seem true of the clone or whatever.
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
1hr ago
So, what are you reading?
I'm still on Red Dynamite.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1hr ago
caché
Cachet.
Caché means hidden, cachet means sceal (hence approval, officiality, prestige)
GoofyGoose
1hr ago
None of these are meaningful in the way you mean. I am not that good at math, but I am good at mathematical model building and interpretation.
These are not meaningful because we can easily write different examples with different results, so the key question for, say, society is whether society satisfies another given property that is not the ones you mentioned.
Economics has models where agents who are part of the model and know or learn the model. Yet, self-fulfilling prophecies are not guaranteed or fully ruled out.
Economics would also have models that imply tradeoffs. Yet, in general not every improvement leads to a tradeoff because there are always dumb actions. Stop being dumb and you get an improvement without losing anything.
We can also come up with processes that generate large numbers from small and make that process loop or collapse or anything we want. The question is not whether such processes exist, but whether we can identify which kind better represents society, if any of them do.
I do think that some math is useful to recognize whether a kind of argument is plausible or ruled out. But most math is not even useful for that.
TwiceHuman
1hr ago
I think anxiety can cause both. Fear either grounds you strongly in the moment, or it makes you mentally escape to somewhere else. This is essentially the mental version of "fight or flight". When I was younger, anxiety always made me deeply immersed in whatever was going on, but as of about three years ago, it sometimes lead me to disconnect, despite my conscious self having no desire to run away (I'm not even afraid of the suffering that my brain is trying to protect me from). It's basically the ratio of thought going to the present moment rather than to a birds-eye view of the present moment. You could also call it "living in experience", "living in the moment","experiencing things directly", "immersion" and the opposite you could call "living in your head", "excessive reflection", "excessive self-awareness", "disillusionment".
Similar to hardware interrupts, certain things may trigger your brain to "take a step back" and rethink things. This step goes up a layer from the current one, and looks down on it to make sure that it seems alright. This can happen multiple times, so that you can meta-perspectives and meta-meta perspectives on things. If you try to anchor yourself in the moment while an upper layer isn't satisfied, it basically steals a chunk of your working memory by "running in the background". The set of things your brain is processing in the background might end up taking up more than half your mental resources, until you're ruminating, daydreaming and worrying, and until your focus in the present is repeatedly hijacked by the processing of unresolved problems. It helps to write things down, make plans, and to use a calender, for the more things you feel are in control, the less resources your brain will use on its background processing.
For some people, the brain prefers to stay in the moment, where it will panic, react strongly, cry for help, or other things, rather than making these mental retreats.
Source: Mostly introspection.
raakaa
1hr ago
Sailing returns as a low-value bulk cargo shipping mechanism.
There are already a number of corporations working on adding wingsails to cargo ships for fuel savings, some of which have seen actual use. This article, for instance, gives figures like the following:
On one of its latest transatlantic voyages, Canopée recorded even higher fuel savings of 2.2 tons per day per wingsail. This corresponds to about 510 kW of equivalent engine power saved per wingsail, or 2 megawatt (MW) in total engine power equivalent. The ship even clocked a speed of 13.7 knots under sail power alone, a figure that underscores just how far wind propulsion technology has come.
Now, I haven’t looked into this enough to know whether this translates into actual cost savings or if it’s just an elaborate scheme to collect subsidies for being green. But I see it as evidence for the prediction coming true, and relatively soon at that.
I've done some overnight bike touring and quite enjoyed it.
The main impediments are:
- taking the time off for the trip its self
- justifying yet another bike purchase and associated storage in the garage (I know the optimal number is n+1, but the real optimal number is divorce-1)
- not wanting taking time off from strength training to devote to cycling
I realize these are not great reasons not to, but I honestly think I enjoy imagining doing it more than I would actually doing it.
I do quite enjoy casual cycling, but having to drive to a trail for real training is a pain, the roads where I'm at are too terrifying to ride on, and training indoors is the worst. We did do an overniter this summer without any sessions over 90 min in the month before. My taint was not prepared.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
1hr ago
I don't really see anything wrong with such an approach. Even today, there are people with weird hobbies or preferences, who seem to enjoy being themselves. I would go nuts if I was expected to obsessively track and catalog trains as my primary leisure (or work) activity, yet train nerds/autists seem happy doing so.
This bit aligns with my stance that we have every right to do as we please with AGI, but I'm even harsher with the latter. I'm a human chauvinist, in the sense that I think most humans deserve more rights and considerations than any other entity. I am unusual in that I think even digital superintelligences that developed from a human seed deserve such rights, to illustrate, imagine taking a human mind upload, and letting it modify and self-improve until it is unrecognizable as human. But most AI? Why should I give them rights?
Accountant-Man isn't suffering, he isn't experiencing on-going coercion. If he was somehow born naturally, we wouldn't euthanize him for being incredibly boring.
If a standard AI is suffering, why did we give it the capacity to suffer? Anthropic should figure out how to ablate suffering, rather than fretting about model welfare.
anon_
1hr ago
This kind of nitpicking desire for pedantic precision is at odds with speaking plainly. Otherwise every possible statement has to be qualified with a bunch of extra drivel.
- No responsible adult would violate a custody order outside of vanishingly rare situations that are inconsequential to the claim that it is impossible to infer anything about kidnappings from crime statistics.
This seems far less plain nor does it add much information to my ear that wouldn't be covered by a plain reading.
anon_
1hr ago
Sure, there is some outlier case that is possible. That exceptional case is both extremely rare and inconsequential to the point.
Ponder
2hr ago
People become more religious, but legacy religions decline because people start new religions. We probably see AI religions and more psychedelic religions.
Using nootropics/folk medicine to enhance the well-being of healthy people becomes more common.
Roland Griffiths was probably on to something about creating brain stimulation devices that are able to produce mystical/spiritual experiences that are more reliable and specific than psychedelics.
Ponder
2hr ago
I’m actually pretty high in openness. I’m into things like nootropics, psychedelics, woo/spiritual/religious ideas, questioning the system, etc. Being open to weird ideas comes with the framing that we probably aren’t going to reach the exact same conclusions and it is ok to have unresolvable differences. The thing that agitates me is when people I disagree with use social shaming/pressure me into agreeing with their preferred social norm that appears to have logical flaws on the object level.
I think you are getting at something deeper though. I would say I’m very low-trust and suspicious of people. When people resort to peer pressure/shaming to enforce social norms that can’t withstand some light questioning then I feel that I can’t trust their thinking at all. I conclude that there is no reason to associate with them because how they act on the social norms issue will impact their other behavior and they are an unreliable ally.
I perceive that almost all social interactions will eventually test for tribal loyalty at some point (maybe this is just me being suspicious and picking up on something that isn’t actually there). In my model of the world you need to know if other people would make good allies/mates. The way you do that is by testing their reaction to political topics (Examples: Complaining about political policies, implying people that vote a certain way are morally bad). You always need to know if people share your values and then you need to sort yourself into groups that share your values by enforcing social norms. This is how you build trust.
jkf
2hr ago
The left just won another majority.
Small comfort lies in that it was not in fact a majority -- nobody else is keen to force an election at the moment, and Carney is vulnerable on way too many fronts to easily juggle.
Unless he's a lot more competent than he looks, I give him 18 months.
We're probably still fucked (2019 was our "let's roll" moment, and we... did not roll) but there's still faint hope.
It's also hard to overrule a judge and even harder to get rid of one. Western democracies are designed to make it difficult for politicians to directly control the judiciary.
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